1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate in general to managing storage requirements. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to methods and systems for managing the storage on a shared storage space.
2. Description of the Background Art
Electronic mail or email has become an accepted and popular method of personal and official communication. Further, several attachments can be sent with an email. Attachments are separate documents or files that are sent along with the body of the email. These attachments can be music files, images, spreadsheets, word processor documents, and so forth.
An email is transmitted from the email server of the sender to the email server of the recipient. The email, along with its attachments, if there are any, is then stored in the email server till it is accessed and removed by the recipient. Hence, an email requires storage space on the email server. The storage required for an email may be quite large, especially if its attachments are sizeable. This is compounded if the same email is addressed to multiple recipients. In this case, the storage required for the email is equal to the number of recipients multiplied by the size of the email.
In many workgroups, such as an organization with a dedicated email server, the email server provides several individual email accounts. If the same email is transmitted to multiple accounts in the organization, it is stored separately on the same email server for individual email accounts. This results in duplication of content and increased requirement of storage space.
This increased storage requirement, for emails addressed to multiple recipients, is unnecessary and can lead to wasteful expenditure for maintaining excessive storage capacities.
Similarly, storage requirements may also be increased in the case of data servers, file servers, and other storage systems, where the same files or data may be duplicated at multiple locations.